Two pairs of unsafe hands

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power
by Robert Dallek

For a man who once promised the press, way back in 1962, that ‘you won’t have Nixon to kick around any more’, Richard Nixon has turned out to have a remarkably long political afterlife. After a five-and-a- half year presidency, he spent the two decades after his resignation in 1974 patiently building, through books and foreign visits, his reputation as a wise elder statesman. Even now, 13 years on from his death, we have no lack of Nixonalia to choose from: a weighty new biography by Conrad Black, a hit play by Peter Morgan (The Queen) about the famous 1977 David Frost-Richard Nixon interviews, and now Robert Dallek’s book on Nixon and Henry Kissinger, whose memos and transcripts were made available to researchers only in 2004.

Dallek, a prize-winning historian who has written books on presidents Johnson, Kennedy, Reagan, and Roosevelt, wanted to scrutinise the workings of the most famous foreign policy team in American history, ‘to cast fresh light on who they were and why and how they collaborated in their use and abuse of power’. He therefore presents them not only as a pair of strong personalities rubbing up against each other, but also as policymakers whose decisions had real world results for good or ill.

Nixon and Kissinger came together, appropriately enough, over a subterfuge. As the 1968 presidential election approached, Nixon desperately wanted inside information on the progress of the Paris peace talks with North Vietnam, fearing a peace agreement that would hand the election to Lyndon Johnson’s vice-president Hubert Humphrey. Kissinger had a contact on the negotiating team in Paris, and secretly passed updates to the Republican candidate’s campaign. In an act of stunning cynicism, Nixon then put pressure on the government of South Vietnam to avoid the peace talks.